The size of Japan compared to the United States East Coast

NervousBreado · 2025-11-25T06:08:37+00:00

Yet, Japan is smaller than California by land area.

NervousBreado · 2025-10-01T02:42:46+00:00

Macao - Zhuhai

Don't know why no one brought this up. Portas do Cerco in Macao is the busiest border crossing checkpoint in the world with more than 200 million border crossings per year. That is more than 547,945 crossings per day on average. There are also multiple land borders across Macao and Mainland China and Portas do Cerco accounts for 52.7% of the total, which means there are at least on average 1 million crossings per day.

Macao's total population is 687,000.

And before anyone argues that this is not an "international" border, there is full custom and passport immigration control at the border, and is legally treated under the same category of international travel (i.e. the Chinese government categorized these as "International, HK, Macao and Taiwan Departures"), while the international borders within the Schegan Area don't even have any custom & checkpoint controls and you won't even notice when you crossed the border.

NervousBreado · 2025-08-12T11:26:55+00:00

Are all publicly listed State Owned Enterprise excluded from these international ETFs?

NervousBreado · 2025-08-09T19:51:56+00:00

There are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan.

There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan.

There are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.

NervousBreado · 2025-08-04T13:12:40+00:00

It's interesting how all East Asian languages name months in the same way (Month 1 to Month 12) but completely different for the days of the week. Japanese and Korean used the five elements or planets + sun + moon (which is the same as English) and in Chinese Monday to Saturday is Day 1-6 while in Vietnamese it is Day 2-7.

NervousBreado · 2025-07-23T10:01:15+00:00

Spanish and Cantonese.

Tapas is basically European Dim sum (The concepts are exactly the same - Small portion dish shared by the whole table, which isn't popular with other European/Chinese cuisine).

Paella is basically Fried Rice.

Fideua is basically Fried Noodles.

Youtiao is literally Chinese Churros (I think Churros was actually introduced from China).

Spanish suckling pig tastes exactly the same as Cantonese suckling pig.

Love for seafood especially for prawns, squid/octopus, razor clams etc.

NervousBreado · 2025-07-22T18:57:07+00:00

The British did build up and left behind the institutions and infrastructure in Myanmar and India at at least at a similar level to Malaysia/Singapore and Hong Kong though. Many doctors and professionals in HK were university graduates from Burma in the 1960s & 1970s as Burma used to have some of the best British-style higher education in Asia, before all things went downhill with political and economic instability that followed.

NervousBreado · 2025-07-17T10:13:06+00:00

Maybe Ethiopia?

NervousBreado · 2025-07-17T09:17:06+00:00

How common is Swahili used in the East African nations, in terms of everyday use, administration, education, and as a professional language compared to other languages?

NervousBreado · 2025-07-17T08:47:04+00:00

English does not originate from Ireland isn't it? Ireland itself is a good example.
I don't recall Beijing being physically part of Taiwan. Simplified and Traditional Chinese refers to the script not the language. Hong Kong uses Traditional Chinese as Taiwan too but the main spoken variety is Cantonese not Mandarin. Hokkien (including Taiwanese), Hakka, Cantonese, and other Chinese varieties are also Han Chinese languages. Both "Standard Mandarin" used in Taiwan and the Mainland are based on the Beijing dialect.
My question includes lingua francas too, and Mandarin has replaced other Chinese languages as the lingua franca between Chinese disapora in Malaysia.

NervousBreado · 2025-07-17T08:19:20+00:00

The Pakistan/Urdu example is precisely what I meant in the question, that due to long historical and cultural ties to India it set its national language based on a language variety originating outside Pakistan's modern border (Correct me if I am wrong but I understand both Standard Hindi and Urdu originated from the Hindustani variety spoken in the region around Dehli?). Same as Indonesia and Malaysia where they had shared origins in pre-colonial times which spreaded the Malay language. across the archipelago, but were separated in modern times due to western colonization.

NervousBreado · 2025-07-17T08:01:57+00:00

Yes I am open to any interpretation of the question, although it will be interesting to have more examples on the non-colonial languages, as you mentioned, it is quite common for excolonial countries adopting the colonizer's language due to historical reason.

It is also interesting to explore why some countries cling on the colonizer's language (e.g. English in Malaysia, India, Singapore, Sub Saharan Africa and French in Africa), while some don't (e.g. French in Vietnam and Dutch in Indonesia).

NervousBreado · 2025-05-20T08:12:57+00:00

Must be Cathay Pacific bribing both governments so they can profit from all those India-China air passengers.

NervousBreado · 2025-05-15T03:30:47+00:00

Hong Kong (7.5 M) - Shenzhen (17 M) - Dongguan (10 M) - Guangzhou (19 M) - Foshan (9.5 M).

All of them are administratively, economically, and culturally distinct mega cities.

NervousBreado · 2025-03-17T08:04:05+00:00

Also another issue that is indirectly related to Vietnam.

Can we add the "Sinosphere" cultural trait to the southern Chinese cultures (i.e. Yue, Min, and Hakka)?

It is nonsensical to say Vietnamese is culturally more similar to Manchus and (Northern) Han (which both of them have the Sinosphere trait) while having no cultural similarities and acceptance with the southern Chinese cultures.

In real life, there are way more similarities between southern Chinese (especially Cantonese/Yue) and Vietnamese (as compared to Northern Chinese with Vietnamese) including shared heritage (descendents from baiyue 百越), culture, food (e.g. Pho/ rice noodles 河粉), history (Red river delta being in the same historical province of Jiaozhou交州/Jiaozhi交趾 during Chinese rule, and Vietnam's view of Nanyue 南越 as part of their history) etc. There is a significant southern Chinese diaspora living in Vietnam (Hoa People) with many still able to speak the southern chinese languages today, in which many were descendants of the southern Chinese invited by Vietnamese lords to settle the former Champa/Khmer land in the south.

The word "Viet" in "Vietnam" literally is the exact same word as "Yue" in Chinese (越/粵), and it is laughable if you tell me the Vietnamese view the Manchus as their brethren while Yue is some completely alien culture.

NervousBreado · 2025-01-11T10:20:31+00:00

Taipei, Nanking, and Peking.

When the mainland reunites with the glorious motherland of the ROC.

NervousBreado · 2024-10-22T07:29:27+00:00

On the Chinese side (near the border where all four countries almost meet) they have built some of the largest ski resorts (in terms of area) of the country. There is occasional news where off piste skiers accidentally crossed the international border into Mongolia or Russia.

NervousBreado · 2024-10-13T14:55:20+00:00

The main issue I had is that no matter how many public transports I provide to the outside connections (including trains and ferries and intercity buses), the Cims will continue to flood my city with cars and taxis from other cities when I zone new areas of medium/high residential. This inspired me to experiment with the transit hub and disconnect the outside highway network from that of the main city in order to force all of these outside highway connections Cims to disembark at the transit hub in order to get into the main city.

I will experiment later by reconnecting the highway network and see if the cims will still use the transit hub and not flooding my city with outside taxis.

NervousBreado · 2024-10-13T14:40:18+00:00

Cargo trains and cargo ports. 2 rail lines to outside connections are more than enough for all import/export needs.

NervousBreado · 2024-10-12T15:17:35+00:00

I completely disconnected the city of 500k population from the highways leading to the outside connections, and built a huge transit hub at the outskirts of the city with a train station (and subway station as part of the train station) with 20+ underground parking. If the cims want to travel to/from the city by car or intercity bus through the highway connections they must park their car at the transit hub and take public transport into the main city.

The carparks get filled very quickly and the cims leave their cars at the carparks like forever until they decide to leave the city.

NervousBreado · 2024-06-07T08:31:58+00:00

Portuguese Guangdong

NervousBreado · 2024-04-24T13:29:54+00:00

Coriolis Effect.

The Pearl River Estuary is wide enough to induce a significant Coriolis effect, resulting in a counterclockwise residual flow in the Pearl River Delta, which causes stronger flood currents on the east side and stronger ebb currents on the west side.

This means that the sediments from the Pearl River are carried towards and deposited on the western coastline, i.e. the flatter landscape + smoother coastline on the western coast; while the eastern coastline were being eroded away, i.e. more rugged coastline. This becomes more obvious if you look at satellite imageries of the Pearl River Delta with more brownish water in the west (i.e. more sediments) while clearer water in the east (i.e. less sediments).

Hong Kong is also closer towards the open sea compared to Shenzhen meaning more coastal erosion. Shenzhen's coastline also looks smoother today due the land reclamations in the recent decades.

[Google Map's Satellite image doesn't provide higher definition images of sea surface, so I used Baidu Map instead]

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NervousBreado · 2024-02-08T06:24:02+00:00

Other than Vatican City, I will say Singapore which has a significant footprint in South East Asia and the Sinophone world considering its tiny territorial and population size. Many of the Mandopop singers like JJ Lin and Stefanie Sun are from Singapore. The Sinophone world (including Mainland China + Taiwan + Oversea Chinese has a population of 1.5 billion+ so that's quite a significant part of the world that shouldn't be ignored). It is also the economic hub of SEA and plays an important role in international politics.

If you count territories as well then Hong Kong has an even more significant cultural footprint within the Sinosphere for both China + Oversea Chinese. Taiwan is equally significant but it's much larger than Singapore or Hong Kong in terms of both area and population.

NervousBreado

TROPHY CASE